I got a lot of interesting tweets about this (Thanks!) and wanted to see what you all have to say >140 chars.
Three anecdotes that led to my sending the tweet:
• I've been thinking quite a bit about Branch use cases, and I have a hunch that in many online group settings, needs for privacy and exclusivity get confounded.
• I was recently invited to a small Facebook group for community managers, where <100 people mostly trade tips and ask for advice. They want exclusivity, but they've ended up defaulting to privacy. Why is this?
• There's a well-known listserv for women in technology, which (to my knowledge) is billed as private but is ultimately still a listserv, so emails do occasionally get forwarded. Do they expect true privacy?

Does anyone write online expecting true privacy anymore?

I got a lot of interesting tweets about this (Thanks!) and wanted to see what you all have to say >140 chars.

Three anecdotes that led to my sending the tweet:• I've been thinking quite a bit about Branch use cases, and I have a hunch that in many online group settings, needs for privacy and exclusivity get confounded.• I was recently invited to a small Facebook group for community managers, where <100 people mostly trade tips and ask for advice.They want exclusivity, but they've ended up defaulting to privacy.Why is this?• There's a well-known listserv for women in technology, which (to my knowledge) is billed as private but is ultimately still a listserv, so emails do occasionally get forwarded.Do they expect true privacy?

Here are a few of the tweets you all replied with for reference.I know Parker brought up the idea of third-party intrusion, which is — I think, at least — a separate conversation in many ways.I'm most interested in the social aspect of privacy, like what Rick tweeted: "It's not that hard as long as you never tell a soul."How does the concept of privacy fit in with the way we use the internet now?

I'm wonky about this issue, in part because I work at an organization that tackles online privacy issues.I think these are very important questions to ask.I think Libby's not even really talking about person-to-person communication, though.It's a worthy question whether I should expect the contents of an email I send to Libby to be more private than the contents of a postcard or a letter or a telegram or an SMS, but that's not the question at hand, right?It seems to me that the question is more about the way trust works in groups than about technology.Groups meeting AFK would confront the same issues, right?Agreeing internally that private listserv messages don't get forwarded out just seems like an online Chatham House Rule, no?

Bahhh was just about to post that link here, too.Re: your comment that this branch is "more about trust than technology," this Shirky post has stuck with me.Worth reading if you haven't already."Technical and social issues are deeply intertwined.There's no way to completely separate them."

I do think that the ability to perfectly replicate a message is a significant difference, though.A forwarded email is a better replication than a quoted line.(Think Mother Jones releasing just a transcript of Mitt Romney's 47% comments would have made national news?)

When I covered education in Cedar Rapids, I found and created a list of about 200 local high school students.It helped me get a feel for what was going on in schools and acted as an early-warning system for major events like lockdowns (the list still exists at twitter.com as I donated my old Twitter account to The Gazette's new edu reporter.)

I thought the younger "digital natives" would get that everything on Twitter was public, but almost all were shocked when contacted by me that I had read what they wrote.I asked a principal about this and he said, "They don't even realize I can read their tweets, let alone you."Interesting since we tend to assume the young are all digitally savvy.